Space Hominid wrote:This strip got me curious about its possible roots. Does anyone know a real-world example of when science gets something wrong and a culture runs with it despite contrary evidence?
Every time someone links me a study, this is pretty much how it goes. Nutrition is chock-full of this sort of stuff. I can think of two examples:
Ancel Keys. He published a study that seemed to damn saturated fat. Looking back through the study, however, it's pretty obvious that he cherry-picked data (from an epidemiological study, to boot), and a shitton of people did, in fact, point out that he cherry-picked data. Time didn't care. He became famous, and saturated fat was held in such low esteem that anyone with any sort of health consciousness stayed away. So, naturally, all observational studies afterwards "proved" that this was true... in spite of clinical trials showing that replacing carbohydrates with saturated fat increases HDL and lowers triglycerides more than unsaturated fats.
And, similarly, vegetarianism. It's become so ingrained in our society that vegetarianism is the way to go that the most health conscious individuals began adopting vegetarianism into their lifestyles. They stayed away from
all animal flesh... in addition to exercising more, sleeping more, taking multivitamins, etc. Observational studies, which can't account for the effects of health consciousness, once again "prove" that vegetarianism is healthier. Clinical trials, on the other hand, show increased deaths from all-cause mortality, including heart disease and
suicide (this one by a
lot), and the same results are found when studying vegetarians whose lifestyles are not that much different overall from their neighbors (religious vegetarians, for example). It's no wonder that so many would die, considering the fact that observational studies that examine blood tests show extremely high homocysteine levels in vegetarians and vegans, even amongst those that take supplements. Vegetarians just manage to outweigh the damage their diet does by living healthier in other ways.
Speaking of living healthier in other ways, that brings us to exercise. To lose weight, people are often told to run. It's good for the heart anyway, they say. Both are false. Well, the first is semi-false. The latter is absolutely false. Running might help you lose weight, but it'll be muscle. Long-distance runners are very often "skinny-fat," where they're at the "healthy" BMI, but their body fat percentage is incredibly high. This is because they've spent that running time burning muscle and putting away central body fat. How a person is affected by cortisol depends how this happens, certainly, but for the most part, running is bad for
fat loss. Oh, and as for hearts? Marathon runners have more damage to their hearts as well as increased rates of heart attacks than not only people that live sedentary lives, but also people that are considered high-risk for heart problems.
So what I want to say about this comic? So. Fsking. True.